PPC Back to Basics – How to Use Reporting in Bing Ads

As explained in this article on Search Engine Land, for 52% of small businesses proving the ROI of their advertising efforts is top of mind. Not only are there more products and features available in Search today which are easy to use and really relevant to smaller businesses – it is also easier to prove the effectiveness of your pay-per-click efforts.

In this blog post we’ll explain to you how to use reporting in Bing Ads so that you’re always on top of your search campaigns’ results, able to make the right adjustments, and ready to tell anyone at any moment just what sort of ROI you are seeing as a result.

Reports in Bing Ads can help you to better track your online advertising budget and spend, evaluate your ad and keyword performance, and give you very specific campaign insights so that you can optimise your campaigns. We’ll give you a brief introduction to the main reports, what you can use them for, how you can tailor them to your needs, and schedule them so that you receive them at set times.

What sort of reporting views are there and what do they show you?

There are two ways to understand your performance on Bing Ads - look at our dynamic ‘performance trend graphs’ or pull and schedule reports in Excel.

For a quick view of what’s going on, try our highly visual Performance Trend Graphs, which can be configured for the specific metrics you want to see, and are available as you navigate through the Bing Ads UI on the Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Keywords tabs. On any performance trend graph, you can choose from eight different metrics:

Clicks

Impressions

Spend

Average CPC

Click-through rate (CTR)

Average position

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Conversions

Peaks and valleys in the graph show where you have had good performance and where you haven’t.

In addition you can directly link changes you made to your account performance, as our Change History Report is now converted into this format.

In terms of reports you can run in excel, there are five main report categories. If you’re new to PPC it can be a bit much to wade through all of the data, determine what information you need most and get your head around the relevant report(s). The Performance and Billing and Budget sections are a good place to start. Under each of the following report types you can also find a range of sub-reports:

1. Performance reports The‘performance report’ section is a group of reports that allow you to pull a range of performance metrics at different levels of your account structure, at the keyword, ad, ad group, destination URL, campaign or account level.

o Amongst other things it shows you important KPIs such as impressions, clicks, click-through rates, average cost-per clicks, as well as conversion rates and Return on Advertising Spend.

o If you have decided to use ad extensions such as sitelink extensions or location extensions, you can see these metrics at the extension level.

2. Billing and budget reports: The budget report under this section gives you views that are useful for tracking your spending patterns, such as daily and monthly spend rates, and month-to-date spend views. Your billing history can easily be found in the billing report.

3. Targeting: Targeting reports track which audiences a campaign is reaching. By fine tuning your campaigns to the right people you can really improve your ROI. Targeting includes reports for both the age and gender and geographical location of your audience, and a negative keyword conflict report. Read here to find out more about ad targeting; for ideas on how to reach the right customers for you, have a look here.

4. Campaign analytics: The campaign analytics reporting helps you track what happens after your ad is clicked, and whether you are achieving your goals. track conversions revenue from conversions, advertising costs, and visitor behaviour. To take advantage of the power of this section, consider setting up Bing Ads conversion tracking.

5. Change history: This report tracks changes made to your campaigns and what impact these changes have on your campaign performance. More about it here.

Once you have retrieved your campaign information you should act on any areas you think could do with some improvements. Baffled by the information the report? This article explains what each stat means, alternatively, the blog post ‘Understanding key performance indicators’ explains more about the kind of data you get as well as what you can do to improve each key performance indicator.

Here’s how you create and customise a new report plus schedule regular reports to be emailed to you in the Bing Ads UI.

Create a report

Schedule a report

Customise a report

1

Click ‘reports’

Click ‘my report settings’

Go to one of the five main reports.

2

If not already expanded in the left pane, click ‘standard reports’, and then click performance’

Select the check box next to ‘schedule this report’

Add columns to a report analysing data. Click the attributes link to see results of ads targeted at customers in specific countries and metro areas.

3

Select the unit of time and the download format you want

Select the frequency, day of the week, time of day, start date, and end date for the scheduled report.

Save by clicking the checkbox under ‘my report settings. If you want to run a scheduled report, click the checkbox to generate a periodic report.

4

Click ‘run’ to run the report, or ‘download’ to download the report as CSV, TSV, or XLSX

Enter the email address where you want the report sent to, and indicate if you want the report sent as an email attachment.

5

Save by clicking the checkbox under ‘my report settings. If you want to run a scheduled report, click the checkbox to generate a periodic report.

Click ‘run’. Save by clicking the checkbox under ‘my report settings. If you want to run a scheduled report, click the checkbox to generate a periodic report.

When you schedule an automatic report, you can request an email notification each time it runs. If you want to have the report added as an attachment, select ‘include the report as an email attachment’. A video on reporting in the Bing Ads UI can be found here, training on reporting can be found here.